How to Get the Most Out of Your Agency Relationship

Let’s tackle the least comfortable fact first.

BetterBriefs surveyed more than 1,700 marketers and agency staff across 70 countries alongside the IPA. Eighty per cent of marketers reckon they write good briefs. Ten per cent of agencies agree. On strategic direction the gap widens into a chasm: 78% of marketers believe their briefs give clear strategic steer, against 5% of creative agencies who concur.

The estimated cost of poor briefing and the misdirected work that follows it translates to roughly a third of marketing budget. A third, gone before anyone has designed anything or started real work.

The remedy is almost never a longer brief. It requires a fuller picture: what is the business genuinely under pressure to deliver this year? Which competitor is taking share? Which stakeholder is sceptical? What would change their mind? What was tried two years ago that nobody mentions anymore?

It feels kind of like an old adage of some sort. Hand an agency a task and you will get the task, competently, on time. Hand them the problem and they can tell you if the task is wrong. Something that's worth considerably more, and you can only buy it with more context.

Vague feedback is expensive, and it costs more than you think. Late feedback is worse, because by the time it lands, there is already work stacked on top of it. BetterBriefs found 69% of marketers and 73% of agencies agree that rebriefs happen far too often, further increasing costs along the way.

Specificity saves money. Tell your agency which of three routes felt right and precisely what made it feel right, and they calibrate faster on the next project, and faster still on the one after. Most clients are diligent about explaining what missed, while what landed is equally as valuable – often a curious omission given praise carries the same instructional weight and costs nothing.

Then comes the harder part. Mark Ritson has long made the case for the kind of agency relationship where they will tell you that your strategy is weak rather than nodding along politely. You have to make it unmistakable that honesty is safe, then keep proving it the first few times somebody takes you at your word.

Aprais found challenge was the behaviour that climbed most sharply among award-winning teams. Plenty of clients now ask for it, but it's important they really do make room for it.

Trust was the highest-scoring behaviour among the best-performing pairs in the Aprais data. It is also the one most commonly held in "escrow", released only once an agency has served out an unspecified probationary period.

Sequencing like this has a high price. Trust is what lets an agency triage ideas and output sensibly when a deadline compresses, raise a problem in week two instead of week six, and put forward the idea with risk attached. Withholding it will still get you compliance, which in reality is precisely what you ask for: on time, but not one degree beyond it.

This has all been studied and voted on by the market. ANA and 4As found average client-agency tenure now sits at roughly seven years, more than double the 3.2 years reported in 2016, with trust and transparency named as the foundation. Clients running no mandatory reviews averaged 8.1 years. Those reviewing frequently managed as little as 3.8. The average cost of running a (large) pitch sat at $408,500.

Any kind of churn carries a price tag, and it lands on your side of the ledger.

Weekly check-ins, a named contact (at both ends), an open channel for the small questions, that would otherwise sit unsent in somebody’s drafts.

None of this is clever, but the sum of it is what keeps work moving.

A standing fifteen minutes that happens reliably will outperform a monthly steering group that gets rescheduled twice, and continuity matters just as much. 

Institutional knowledge is one of the few genuinely compounding assets in a long agency relationship, where a slice of it leaves with every avoidable handover.

Clients sometimes share insights with us that sit outside the brief. It could be a board priority that shifted in March, or maybe it was a budget conversation that was still unresolved. It might've been about a campaign from two years back that landed badly internally and left a mark.

None of it belongs on a brief, but it changes what we recommend and what we do. When a project goes sideways, it's almost never because the work was beyond capabilities. More likely it's because the visible problem was solved while the real one sat elsewhere.

I have seen this most clearly in accounts that have grown from good to great. It always traces back to a moment when a client started sharing something they didn't have to, because they wanted us to understand the "why" and not just react to the "what".

Single conversations like that change how we approach everything after it, with more insight and understanding to work with.

All of these habits are free and in fact increase the value of our work. Context, feedback, trust and rhythm cost attention and nothing else, and attention happens to be the one input that's controlled outright.

Most client-agency relationships plateau a long way below what they were capable of, and that ceiling is rarely about capability. It forms exactly where the groundwork stopped, and stays there until somebody decides the relationship deserves the same attention and the same rigour as the work.

The best partnerships get built deliberately and patiently, and with effort on both sides.

So the question worth sitting with is: does your relationship setup let your agency do its best work? Or only the work you asked for?

If you would like to talk about how a partnership like that gets built, get in touch.